


Loved in Full

by zeldadestry



Category: The Prestige (2006)
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Yuletide 2008
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-13
Updated: 2008-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-26 11:49:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeldadestry/pseuds/zeldadestry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You’ve chained me to yourself, rooted me to this world."<br/>(Please note that fic contains SPOILERS for the entire movie. Pairing is listed in notes at top of fic.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Loved in Full

**Author's Note:**

> written as an extra treat for Molly Wilde in the 2008 yuletide exchange  
> Pairing:Borden/Borden

You have always loved your brother.

It is always there for both of you to take from each other: consolation, comfort, and heat.

  
It isn’t fair that you have been in one continuous battle with him since he married Sarah. You were the one who actually took the vows but no matter. What matters is who means the words and that has always been his burden. It isn’t fair, and yet some days you call the wedding band on your finger your curse. For a long time he refused to see that it had become intolerable for you to live with Sarah while loving Olivia. Yet, much as you love her, you would not throw it all away for her and it sears you to wonder if he would for Sarah.

He bristled when you informed him of your decision. “I don’t want Olivia.”

“Well, I didn’t want Sarah, but you did. How can you resent my chance at happiness after so many years of your own?”

He didn’t like that. He didn’t like that, but he knew you were right. “Do what you have to do and bear the consequences.”

“Don’t you mean we? We will do and we will bear.”

“Stop. Not here.”

You were quiet then, for he was right. In the back room he stands apart from you. You stand apart from each other, you see each other and know each other, as the world never shall. Your only honesty is with each other.

  
“Do you know what I dreamed last night?”

You sleep sounder than he and always have. So often there are pale purple bruises under his eyes. You nuzzle your lips over his collarbone. His fingers brush through your hair in return and you smile. “Tell me.”

“I dreamed of mother. I dreamed she was holding Jess, Jess when she was a baby.”

“You were always her favorite.” It never made you jealous. He’s your favorite, too.

“No. She recognized my will wasn’t strong as yours and she worried about me, she worried I would be broken.”

“I would never hurt you.” Though you sometimes doubt you have done well by him, the accusation stings.

“She knew that, Freddy. Broken down by life, don’t you understand? She didn’t love me more, she pitied me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. She’s been gone so long. Her boys are gone, too. She’d never even recognize us now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” you echo, and kiss him to help him forget.

You never knew what happened to her. You were housed apart from her and not allowed to communicate with her once the three of you moved into the workhouse. Sometimes you or he might see her from the window, call out to her, wave down to her in the street, but then months went by without even that saving glance. He had looked for her at one point, after you’d both begun to make money from the act, but he called off the inquiry once you reminded him that even if he found her, he’d never be able to explain what you’d done. You’ve long accepted that your mother is most likely dead but if he wants to pretend there could be a happy ending, you’ll let him.

  
In the workhouse you had to wear the gray uniforms, just as you do now in prison. Everything you’ve done was to escape that jail of your childhood and here you are again.

  
He is cold to the touch when you bring him up out of the ground, he falls to his knees. His body shudders as he is racked with a hacking cough, like the fresh air burns his lungs. His face is wet with tears you wipe away carefully with a handkerchief while your own fall unheeded.

You take him home, you take him to the workshop. You take off his clothes, scrape away every bit of the costume, and then you help him slip into the tub filled with warm, soapy, water. He sits there for a long time, hugging his knees, and you sit on the floor beside him. Neither of you speak, but you run your fingertips through his hair, over the planes of his face, across his shoulders and back, until he takes your hand in his own, kisses it once and holds it tight. After the bath, you guide him into bed in the back room, steal in beside him so that he may share your heat. Your hands can not help but touch him, first in comfort, of course, then in want. He turns to you, he kisses you. He hasn’t allowed you to kiss him for a very long time, and it has been even longer since he has kissed you first.

“You’re the most covetous bastard,” he said once when you reached for him, demanded him. “You’re even obsessed with having yourself.”

“You’re not me. I don’t want myself, I want you,” you said, because it has always been important to you that though you are, technically, the better magician, he is the better man. But is he? “Why did you have to have Sarah? Why? Couldn’t you see it would turn out like this? You’ve frightened her, you’ve forced me to lie day after fucking day, you’ve hurt all of us.”

“Not Jess,” he countered.

No, not Jess. It was true at the time.

  
You hardly remember the first time, for there were so many years of sharing a bed, holding each other in the night, and during all that time you knew you had him. It was not important to be able to remember, not when you knew he belonged to you and there would never be a time when he was not within your reach. It was when you created “Alfred” and “Fallon” that it began to change. A distance grew, you felt it, it became a chasm when he met Sarah. Christ, everything went to hell. He belonged to Sarah and then to Jess and you wanted him for yourself again. Now you wish you could remember the first time, you wish you could remember every time.

You have always known the difference, you have always seen it. How strange that Sarah sees it also. It is wonderful to you, to know that she loves him as you do, though you recognize how painful it is for her to wonder why he is so inconstant. In loving him, you and she also know him, see him alive in his eyes.

Olivia, loving you, notices no difference between you and your brother. Does she even love you, then? “Tickle me again,” she asked you once. “Make me laugh.” You did, all the while marveling that he had been teasing her, finding the spots that made her giggle, kissing them repeatedly. What possessed him? You licked her waist, her belly, her ribs, over and over like a cat grooming her baby and it was beautiful to hear her breathless laugh and feel her feigned struggle against your embrace. “Oh, I love you, Freddy,” she moaned and you love her for calling you that, the name that is all your own, shares nothing with Albert’s name. Names, god damn them, nothing but words. There is no Alfred Borden nor Bernard Fallon, but there are two men who imitate their lives. “We’re artists,” he said once. “We’re the greatest actors who ever lived, and no one knows,” and you smirked in appreciation, such braggadocio from him was unusual.

  
“Say you’re sorry,” he begs, after Sarah’s funeral. “For my sake, Freddy, please.”

“It’s not our fault,” you insist. “It’s not our fault, it was never our fault.” There are riddles you refuse to answer. Which knot did you tie, dear Sarah? A knot that did not slip. Which knot did I tie, dear Julia? A knot that did not slip.

He finishes off her brandy, he cries. For the only time you share the bed at the Borden house. You do all you can to comfort him, but he takes no comfort, and when you became angry he seems to relish it, goads you for more and more of your punishment. This is not the last time.

  
This is the last time, though neither of you realizes it. It is a good last time, so that you, sitting in your cell, can gladly count it as one of life’s gifts that you shall be sorry to forsake. It is always good. There has never been a time it wasn’t. In the dark, your eyes closed, in the light, your eyes open, it has always been good. What has ever pierced you more than the simple fact of his hand at your shoulder when he showed you his sketches in the role of ingenieur? Easier than anything in your life, you would turn your head, wait for him to mirror the movement and kiss him.

“You have to let it go,” he pleads as you lie together. “We must think only of Jess. You must think of Jess.” He raises his head to meet your eyes, to make sure you are listening. “And me,” he says, “think of me,” but you do not yet understand.

You wake first and you kiss him while he sleeps. This is the last time, had you only known it in the moment. He is still sleeping and you lean over him, kiss his shoulder, blade and curve, his throat’s hollow and his cheek’s.

There has never been a trick you could not solve together. Never.

You will not live to learn Angier’s secret, but he will. Jess will be safe and happy with him. He will live.

Three words you can take with you, all the way to the gallows: he will live.

Shall we pull back the curtain on memory’s magic, call remembrance forward for the most profound of bows followed by the most grateful adulation of the crowd?

He will live and you in him, for no reason now but love.

  
You have always loved your brother.

All you ever had was each other and a will to survive, then thrive. Jess will never be adrift, alone, as the two of you had been.

He has always been stronger, even ruthless. He has the fiercer temper, there’s a wildness you love in him yet do not envy for yourself.

You wouldn’t have made it through without him, you know that, and yet you sometimes think that looking out for you gave him a reason to persist. Taking care of you has at times been his true purpose.

  
You stole, it was true, because who would not steal if they could do it without getting caught and were fed nothing but gruel? You stole always for each other, always as a gift to each other, brandishing the prize before each other as you would brandish the red rubber ball in the future. “Are you watching closely?” you would tease each other before showing off the apple, the hunk of bread, the wedge of cheese. Then you would share. You have always shared

And what wouldn’t you give to be with him now, share him and be shared by him, one last time?

Is it punishment for the loss of Sarah? Is it punishment for pretending to be one man? Made as two, yet you lived as one in so many different ways.

Yet you have never and will never call it sin, those nights when you fused your bodies together.

He is the one who reconciles you to living, he has the nerve and the dare to make life spark. He pulls you up and he puts you on stage and he makes whatever magic comes into your life appear.

You dream that you find Angier and drag him to the prison. You dream that they let your brother go. You walk down the stairs with him and out into the street. Your arms are around him and everyone sees that you are two men, two men, both whole, lives lived in full.

  
It is never only for the release of your bodies. It is for this, to see your brother’s frustration and fury and transform it, with your touch, with your, yes, love. And when you find yourself in sorrow and guilt, he lays his hands on you, kisses you until the clamp on your heart dissolves and you are free again. “Let it go,” you whisper, and his hand ceases roaming up and down your back. “Let it be over, let it be ended. We’ll find our way, we always do.”

  
The day you let him shout at Sarah, you make good on what you have always feared. You love her but you have failed her. You can not live without either of them and yet, because you will always protect the secret, you put him first. Since her death, that knowledge perpetually haunts you, makes you hate yourself. “How could I?” You have asked him so many times that he no longer listens. “How could I let you talk to her that way?” You’re still astonished at your refusal to intercede. Have you been playing Fallon so long that you’ve become him in some way? Have the costumes and the characters completely consumed you? Repulsion gnaws away inside of you, but there’s no one else to blame. You invented this whole farce, you had the first evil idea and you wish you’d never spoken a word of it out loud. But you have always shared everything with you brother, how could you not share it?

  
“I love you,” you say, “but you don’t love me. You don’t love anything anymore but winning, besting him.”

“You’re being a fool.”

“I’ve already lost, Freddy. I’ve lost everything besides you and Jess. I’ve lost Sarah and we’ve lost the act.”

“That’s Angier’s fault.”

“Damn Angier! Stop making it about him. When are you going to stop and look this in the face and admit it! Admit what we ourselves have done. We’re not blameless.”

“If he’s taken the act from us, he’s taken everything. We’ve always been better than he is, always. We were nothing, came from nothing, and look what we made of ourselves!”

You can not even look at him when he says that. “We were never nothing. There are few places where I can’t agree with you, but that is one.”

He takes you into his arms. “I think you are the one and I am but the copy. I think you were the first.”

“We’re neither of us copies.”

“No? Tell me, haven’t you ever wondered which of us received the larger portion of our soul?”

His words make you shiver, you hold him tighter. “Do you really believe we share a soul?”

“No,” he says, but you know he’s lying.

“You’ve chained me to yourself, rooted me to this world.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I don’t know. I only know that we must be together.”

  
Sometimes you lose track of the permutations. You are Albert, he is Frederick. Then there is Alfred, whom you both play, Fallon, the same.

There is such comfort in the back room, where there are no windows. It is the only place where you dispense with Fallon and Alfred, where you let both of yourselves be yourselves, no disguises or pretending. You have taken off the Fallon costume, but there is no place Alfred needs to be, not yet, so your brother waits to put it on. You lean into him and he kisses your good hand. He ignores the damaged one, he always does, as though he blames himself. “Should we lie down?” you ask him. It is never a good idea to ask him. “Lie down,” you tell him and he does as you say. You unbutton his shirt, for he will need to dress up again, eventually, and you will change into the very clothes he has been wearing. Perhaps they will still be warm when you slip into them. Certainly they will smell like him. You bow your head and bring your lips to his body.

  
Fred was always quicker than you to pick up a new illusion. The two of you practiced together but once he had it down, he’d demonstrate it over and over as you watched. And when you would finally, finally, get it right, he’d be right there with the celebratory kiss.

There is nothing more to say. In the morning, even before the sun rises, you will wake and know it is his last day.

It is his last day and in some ways it will be yours, as well. You have never lived without him. The man you have always known and called yourself is about to disappear. Four men will go up in flames and you will continue on, changed in so many ways, yet constant in your heart.

You will always love your brother.  



End file.
